How does my garden grow?

Um. Weedy.

This may have something to do with the fact that I planted our garden in a friend’s back yard two days before we left for California.

It rained while we were gone and the weeds. Oh, the weeds! Well, let’s just say they were fantastic after that 3 week hiatus. Since our return we have weeded about 1.5 times. Yes, please do the math. It is not enough weeding time at all.

And one of those times I seriously had to push my way through milk weed and all sorts of green annoyances just to find our peppers and broccoli. Such cute, cunning little peppers!

Goal 1: Be more consistent at weeding.

Goal 2: Find zucchini recipes that my family will eat that don’t require a bazillion eggs.

Yes, our zucchini is alive and well. It is growing like crazy, which was fun at first since last year I only ended up with yellow squash. Unfortunately, my tendency is to forget to pick the zucchini while they are little and instead wait until they are the size of a child’s baseball bat. What on earth do I do with something this large?!?

This year I was able to hang on to my resolve from last year and instead of planting nearly 30 tomato plants I only planted 12. I was very proud. We have a few rogue tomatoes from last year, some of which I am letting live in the case that they end up being a different variety than the ones I planted.

I also planted onions, lettuce (last year ours was eaten in about two weeks by deer), parsley, basil, cucumbers, lettuce, broccoli, peppers, and of course, zucchini.

Our cucumbers are looking lovely – we actually picked and ate some last night when we finally went over to weed in the 91 degree humidity and discovered that two weeks was too long to leave the weeds on their own. I am excited about the cucumbers because I didn’t grow them last year and I really like cucumbers. The broccoli, on the other hand… Meh. I guess you can’t have everything.

Our lettuce is also spectacular. I planted an overabundance this year, since we lost it all to Bambi last year and so far, we are the only ones eating it. This is both a blessing and a curse, as we now have lettuce towers. Seriously, you could hide small children in our lettuce plants. Also, my pregnant self is just not all that enthused by lettuce right now. Peaches on the other hand? Husband brought home 11 pounds of peaches the other day and I was a very happy woman.

Seriously, here is a before and after shot yesterday of the same spot in the garden! I hate weeds.

I have to say, tending our little garden patch gives me a healthy respect for farmers. I can’t imagine investing all my money and time into something that may or may not produce and that needs so much attention. In the meantime, we are enjoying our little garden and looking forward to tomatoes!